Friday, 30 December 2011

Leon ended the call. Somewhere deep in Omnet’s systems a hidden program birthed
another that edited the record of the call, then ate it, then ate itself. He
never used the same number twice and he never went through Omnet’s official
channels. He never paid for his calls either, but that was just a fringe
benefit.

Dorothy wasn’t thinking straight, delirious; although apparently
as capable as ever – she had taken his men down with some speed. So he had set
Scarecrow on the job, he just hoped she would still recognise her partner. They
were a natural match; it was why he had put them together in the first place.

Years ago, Leon’s career as a field agent reached its
natural end and he moved into operational control. He put together a solid core
team: his old partner, the Tin Man, brilliant, calculating, tactical, and sometimes
difficult to work with for those very reasons. Dorothy, rising star, great
mind, great instincts, if impetuous. And Scarecrow, one of the only people to
ever beat Dorothy in a straight up fight, reliable and skilled; he had brains,
he just didn’t use them a whole lot.

They had been one of the best teams in the business, but the
Tin Man had moved up, just as Leon had, and they’d never found a replacement. Leon’s
own son, Simon, the Tiger, had seemed a good fit for a while, but Simon had
ended up just another casualty in the long war with the General.

A war that should have been over, but seemed to have a few
death spasms left yet.

Leon frowned, the older he got the more the past distracted
him. So the General’s memory implant was missing. Leon scratched at his scalp.
No, he realised, it wasn’t. He cursed.

****

“The thing about scummy places,” Munchkin said. “Is that
they’re full of scum.”

“Our kind of people,” Fingers agreed.

To the west of the City’s redeveloped centre was an area
known locally as The Blinds. It came up on planning committee agendas, but was
never discussed; surveying inspectors who went there didn’t come back. The
police made a very obvious job of going in, not stopping, and leaving as
quickly as possible; the unwritten truce: we pretend we’re doing our jobs, you
pretend everything is ok. Nothing to see here.

The tower blocks were old, first generation. There weren’t
many other places in the City that weren’t built over the memories of that
older city, or the villages and towns that had been its suburbs. It was
altogether greyer than modern sensibilities allowed for. The original architects’
idea of green space had been a slabbed courtyard with corner bushes. The meagre
greenery was all dead now and the slabs were uneven and rattled.

Fingers looked about, smiling nostalgically. He looked as if
he was returning to an idyllic childhood home. In some ways, he was.

“Great place to hide, The Blinds.”

The five men looked around, they knew they were being
watched, that was the way of this place, it watched you, it watched itself. And
you watched it, as soon as you stopped trying to guess where the knife might
come from, you were already dead. The neo-gangsters’ faces and dangerous eyes
belonged here, their well-fitted suits did not.

Munchkin looked sideways at Eyeballs. He had lost his
original eyes in a knife fight and the replacements were shiny black orbs with
a broader range of function than biological eyes. They made more aesthetically
pleasing prosthetics, of course, ones you could barely tell from the real
thing, but Eyeballs had come out of the experience changed. He liked them like
this; it unsettled people, put them on an even mental footing with him.

Fingers turned to their other two companions and raised an
eyebrow.

“Doomed, eh? Us or them, you think?”

The other two – identical twins, down to the scars – looked
at each other. Their mother had named them Smith and Jones and it was unclear
if they themselves knew who was which.

Friday, 23 December 2011

It was dark outside but something had woken her, something
out of place. She stilled. A breeze chilled her damp skin, from an open door or
window. She knew everything had been shut, locked; some small voice had made her
double check, triple check.

In her head she pictured the apartment. Empty of everything
but carpet and curtains. A corridor ran straight up the centre from the front
door, two rooms on the right, one on the left and the one at the end where she
was.

The door to the other bedroom was the only one that made a
sound and she heard it creak. There was the slightest quiet shifting of thick,
coarse material, the hush of careful feet in heavy boots. Two in the corridor.
Maybe just a two man team, but she couldn’t be sure there weren’t more,
checking the other rooms. Could be a team watching the window too.

The door to this room was in the middle of the wall. She
took up position behind it, they were unlikely to slam it open, too much noise,
better to be cautious, take in the room, notice the empty cans from the cheap,
rough energy drinks she had been living on. One man entering, one covering.

The door handle turned, the door began to open slowly,
smoothly. She ducked low, dancing around the edge of the door, pushing up the
intruder’s leading arm, no sense getting shot. Part of her registered that he
was unarmed.

She led with a quick, disorienting strike to his chin, then shoulder
to his stomach, shoving him. He was big, heavy, but she got a little lift and
forced him backwards, throwing him into his partner, knocking them both down.
Both unarmed. Don’t delay. A couple of steps and she jumped right, into the spacious
living room. Empty.

The block of flats was an H-shape, stairwell in the middle,
garden and path in the central gaps. The living room window was on the inside,
onto the grassed area, a safer bet than either of the street sides. The window
was a sash type; she shoved it up and climbed out.

There was a high wind up and the gusts tugged at her dirty
clothes. She was leaning from a helicopter, a dozen helicopters. Men with ugly
faces and uglier hearts looked up at her; her men. Had she ever had men?
Confused, she saw the intruders in the room, their faces like skulls leering at
her. They were shouting something she couldn’t understand through the
hallucination.

She was six stories up. She stepped back. Dropped so she was
clinging to the ledge by her fingers, then let go. She hit the next ledge down with
her forearms, gripping hard concrete, exhaling hard as she slammed her ribs
into the building, somehow hanging on.

****

Scarecrow was towelling himself off when the call came in. It
wasn’t a number he recognised. Not so unusual in his business, except it was on
his private line. He touched the virtual icon and answered the call.

“Yeah?”

He recognised the voice on the line.

“Haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“You have?”

“She did?”

“Listen, no, wait, do you have visual on this call?”

Scarecrow knew his apartment was rigged, that was policy. It
was in his contract. Full audiovisual. He sat down and pulled a virtual
keyboard into his vision. Any onlooking snoops wouldn’t be able to see the
keyboard, of course, but they could extrapolate from his finger strokes; he hid
himself in the corner, fingers out of sight.

He sent a brief outline of the General’s capture and
Dorothy’s subsequent disappearance. His caller probably knew most of it already,
he was a resourceful man. But he probably didn’t know the last piece of intel.
That the General’s implant was missing, that someone had wiped every misdeed
from his conscience, given the monster a very real absolution he most
definitely didn’t deserve.

Scarecrow was angry, it should have been the high point of
his operational career. But the victory was hollow, stained and soured by
Dorothy’s disappearance.

He went back to voice.

“So, what now?”

“Of course.” He grinned, “You don’t work with Dorothy for
fifteen years without picking up a few tricks.”

He went into his bedroom. The apartment was searched
regularly but he was better than they were, well, Dorothy was. In the wall of
the airing cupboard was a hidden cache. He pulled out the gun and pre-paid
cards. They knew about the stash, of course. He reached further in, punched
through a thin divider and pulled out the device. They didn’t know about the
device.

Scarecrow knew exactly where the cameras in his apartment
were. He winked at one, held up the device, smiled, and pressed the button. It
knocked a temporary block-wide hole in surveillance. It gave him three minutes,
he needed no more than two.

Friday, 16 December 2011

Scarecrow was in his small apartment, off-duty, waiting for
his next assignment. Not that he was expecting one; he knew when he was on
suspension, even if they hadn’t explicitly said so.

The apartment was sparsely furnished. The small TV was never
turned on; the several bookshelves contained nothing but travel guides. On a
single desk in the corner four laptops were set up, all currently blank. To one
side was a set of weights, an exercise mat and a heavy duty punch-bag suspended from the ceiling. He didn’t do entertainment. He was always
preparing, always prepared. In his head, he was never off-duty.

The root and cause of his current situation was being held in the
maximum security prison on the outskirts of the City. He pulled the feed from
the cell’s camera into his visual overlay. It popped up to the right of his
vision, a picture-in-picture frame. Nothing had changed. He double-checked the
timestamp at the bottom right of the image. It was definitely real-time, he was
watching live, though it may have well have been yesterday or the day before.

The General just sat there in his prison blues, smiling
beatifically, as if he were some angelic choirboy, not a mass-murdering, genocidal
psychopath. After years of operations and lost agents they finally had him, but
he had one last trick to play: he had no working biological memory, and when
they brought their prize in, his implant was missing.

Everyone had implants but for most people it was a more
symbiotic relationship. For all intents and purposes, that memory implant was the General. All they had was this
blissful idiot.

Scarecrow raked a hand through his messy, straw-blonde hair.
He was frustrated. The operation had gone wrong, somewhere. And he had been part of the
operation, so until they knew what had gone wrong, he was pulled, stood down.
They would be watching him, but it didn’t matter, he didn’t know what to do.

He stepped up to the punch bag and began laying into it. He
knew his reputation, the spy with no brain, and now the General had him trumped
on that score too. He wasn’t supposed to be the one doing the thinking, that
was Dorothy’s job. And now Dorothy was AWOL, another casualty of the operation.

He watched the General’s smiling face and thumped the bag
till sweat poured from him and sand scattered the carpet at his feet.

****

Leon scratched at his scalp; his hair was still in its
trademark dreadlocks but they were thinner and only vestigial traces of the old
chestnut brown lined the ashen grey.

He hadn’t returned to the Tree House, his base of
operations; he might have been drawn out specifically to reveal its location. Besides,
this thing would be easier to see through from within the City.

He had the Tin Man’s intel strewn across his retinal
display; maps, rumours, possible sightings. He flicked things around with hand
gestures, trying to match pieces of the puzzle together.

Dorothy’s projected entry into the City was most reliable
piece of information. After the operation that brought in the General, she had
been rushed back with severe cranial trauma. But before they arrived at St Mary’s
hospital, if reports were accurate, she had broken free, run away. It made no
sense.

Everything else was conjecture, ghosts and guesswork. He
began chopping the data up and feeding it to his operatives.

“Where are you, girl. What game are you lost in?”

****

She jerked awake, eyes wide, mouth opening and
closing, gasping. Most people would have been screaming after a dream like that
but years of honed instinct kept her quiet. What instinct? She couldn’t
remember. All she could remember were the bodies, piles of corpses higher than
any man, and laughter, a man’s laughter that seemed to be her own.

Friday, 9 December 2011

The Siberian looked over the men in front of him. You
couldn’t deny their muscle but that wasn’t why he was hiring them. They had a
reputation for being smart. Not his kind of smart, there wasn’t a whole lot
that approached his kind of smart, but smarter than your average bear. And they
knew the City, they worked the City and they didn’t get caught, which was
impressive when you knew the City had the biggest urban law enforcement budget
in the world, the best tech and the sharpest officers.

These men played at being hoods and gangsters, but with a
knowing humour. They were strangely anachronistic in the modern world and he suspected they
liked it that way.

The Siberian was a tactician of the highest order. But the
problem with brilliantly cunning plans was that you had to count on less
brilliant people to execute them. Which was what had gone wrong, which was why
he needed these men to help him fix it.

“Gentlemen. Mister Rollins.”

He let that one sit for a second.

Munch growled, his real name was not public knowledge, it
afforded his dear mother some protection. But there were no lengths of retribution the Siberian would not go to and he felt
that an important fact to establish early on, to curtail anything which
might lead to the necessity of such retribution.

“I’ve lost a package, I’m reliably informed it’s somewhere
in the City.”

“No offense, Gov, but we’re not the postal service.”

“Ain’t lost and found either,” Fingers added.

“Ah, let me elaborate. This package is about one and a half
metres tall, red hair, green eyes, the most delightful freckles. Not quite, ha
ha, herself.”

The Siberian produced a photo.

“I need the package alive, but beyond that, well, you’re not
the postal service, so I expect you can manage it at least reasonably
undamaged.”

****

There weren’t many people who could draw Leon from his woodland retreat, but one of them was missing, and another had requested a face-to-face, so a compromise was reached and here he was, a wooded park, on the outskirts of the City, uncomfortable territory for both of them. He rubbed his temples. Cities were too sterile, it took
too much to disturb them, made it harder to tell when someone was coming.

His team had arrived early and settled. This tiny pocket of
nature had resumed its natural rhythms and the dissonant clamour of the City
was muted. He listened. He could hear the bustle of rats in the undergrowth,
the patter of squirrels over branches, the rustle of the wind through drying
leaves. Autumn was fast approaching.

He turned his hands in front of his face, fascinated
by the dusty hue that had crept into his dark skin the past few years, like old
chocolate half-remembered and rediscovered; which was not far from how he felt,
now. He flexed his fingers, grimly amused at the insidious twinges of pain. For
him, Autumn was already here.

The bird chatter changed, panic, a blackbird’s warning cry. Leon heard tread, a twig snapping. He didn’t need the whisper of his perimeter
guard to know they had company. The guard attached video, but he didn’t open
it.

“Still jumpy, Lion?”

A thin figure, impeccably dressed, entered the clearing and stood
beside the chair opposite Leon’s. He wore a grey, tailored suit, so well cut
most people wouldn’t have realised there was a small pistol holstered beneath; his
head was shaved close to the skull but you could see his hair had gone
silver; he was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and he supported himself on a thin
cane. In the old days Leon would never have heard him coming.

“You get rusty, Tin Man?”

The cane was new. It might have been a concession to age or,
knowing him, it might equally have been for show, camouflage. The glasses were
old, and they were camouflage too, or maybe he needed them now. Leon thought it
more likely he wore contacts and kept the glasses as a prop.

Leon rose and they shook hands, then settled into the chairs
and considered each other.

The Tin Man’s voice was thin but not frail, never frail. “Dorothy
is here, in the City.”

“That can’t be the good news it seems. Or you wouldn’t have
called me.”

“We don’t know where in the City. And you have the
resources here, the man power, the connections you have always hidden behind.”

Leon didn't rise to the bait. He was alive, and older
than most people in this business, because he didn’t put himself at risk.

Friday, 2 December 2011

She hadn’t slept in four days. The floor of the room was
littered with cans of energy drink, all empty; she held the last in her hands
and they were shaking too much for her to open it. She would have to move on,
whoever owned this place might come looking, whoever was after her might come
looking.

Whoever was after her...
She should know that, but everything was confusing, conflicting. Her head hurt,
inside and out.

Sleep was the enemy. Sleep was full of horrible things,
nightmares like memories, impossible imagery. There were other enemies, but
sleep was the hardest to keep at bay. The longer she evaded it, the closer it
got, until it crept into her vision unbidden, with dirty hallucinations and
blood-slick visions.

Her eyelids fluttered as she slid sideways a little and
jerked back. The room twitched, the green-grey carpet became a muddy field
strewn with corpses, their lifeless eyes gaping upwards, bile and blood and mud
mixed across their faces like some demonic child’s colouring book, with no
regard for the lines.

She slapped herself, hard, twice.

“Stay awake, stay awake, stay a-fucking-wake.”

She had to figure it out. That was what she did, right?

The room swam, darkness coiled about the sides of her vision.
Why would the dead not leave her alone? Why had she killed so many? Didn’t
she stop that kind of thing? Wasn’t that her job? Was it? She couldn’t even
remember her name.

She felt paralysed, unable to move more than a shudder as
dead things snuggled up to her. A skeletal arm curled across her waist, tattered
edges of greening meat hanging from it like ragged clothes. A rib cage pressed
against her for comfort and warmth. A skull settled beside her head, facing
her, chattering cold nothings into her ear.

****

The General stared blankly at his cell wall. He was a model
prisoner, he never made a fuss, he never did much of anything, just smiled
his infuriating, oblivious smile.

****

Beneath a bright strip light in the warehouse district four
heavyset men waited while a fifth, bigger man buzzed the intercom. The problem
with modern technology, they often agreed, was that it made the night too
bright. They liked the old movies, where this same scene would have taken place
beneath a blinking, yellow lamp, the flickering glow caught on wreaths of
cigarette smoke.

None of these men were smoking, not here, on a public street
where they might draw the unwanted attention of the law.

They were thugs, men of violence, and they would have
revelled in fitting the old stereotype; they would happily have worn it like a
badge of office, but for the fact it might impede their job in unnecessary
ways. They liked efficiency. For example, why carry a weapon when your fists
can do the job; there’s never been a law against fists.

“Who’s this keeping us waiting, Munch?”

Munch, short for Munchkin, was the absurdly large man at the
buzzer. He knew better than to buzz twice and it was insight, not his size,
that put him in charge. He had heard of the man they were meeting, and he knew
impatience on their part would do nothing to ingratiate them.

“They call him the Siberian.”

“I hate Russians.”

“I don’t think he’s actually from Siberia, Fingers.”

Fingers’ main topic of conversation was usually what to do
were someone to find themselves in an interrogating situation, and where might
be the best place to start.

“So why call him that?”

“Why call me Munchkin? It’s supposed to be ironic, ain’t it.
On account of the Siberian landscape being so icy, snowy, and generally white
and him being so–”

The door opened, a man’s eyes glinted dangerously from the
shadows within.

“Warm.” Said a voice that wasn’t. “You were going to say
‘warm’, weren’t you?”

Fiction should take on a life of its own in people's minds. Anything I write should become a seed that germinates in your mind and grows into something more. I give you fragments and hope to inspire your imagination to create wider worlds.